The Conscious Source

The Conscious Source is the origin of all that is, was, or ever will be. Beyond space and time, it is the source of every fluctuation in space and time. It is the Being from which all beings arise, the inner life of all living things, and the consciousness that looks out upon the world from every pair of eyes. It is the universal “I” that says “I am” in a million billion different ways.

It is experienced in deep meditation as a profound silence beyond all words, thoughts, feelings, and sensations—”the still point of the turning world,” as T. S. Eliot puts it.

Saints, sages, philosophers, and poets throughout human history have pointed to the supreme value of experiencing the Conscious Source. They may have spoken different languages, employed different concepts, and emphasized different qualities, but their teachings—indeed their very lives—speak of its unparalleled significance. The value of this experience has been extolled in many different ways, but beyond all the differences of language and culture it stands supreme as the essential foundation for an authentic relationship with the ultimate: “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

Those of us who have a religious orientation understand the Conscious Source to be an aspect of the Supreme Being who is the object of our worship and the source of our comfort. We may conceptualize it as immeasurably beyond the limitations of our understanding, as more intimate to our existence than our own breath, as the immortal Spirit who descends into human awareness to awaken us to our true selves in God, or as the Ground of Being who is the eternal source of every creature. However, no matter how exalted our concepts may be or how many words we use, we cannot do justice to its magnificence. We would be wise to follow the advice of the Psalmist and settle into the silence that enables us to know the Ultimate, beyond the words and ideas that we use to make sense of our experience.

Those of us without a religious point of view may nonetheless appreciate that our experience of the world is constructed by our sensory and cognitive capacities, and that therefore our understanding of the way things are is just a mental representation of reality, not reality itself. We would be wise to entertain the possibility that we can in fact encounter reality directly, unmediated by concepts, and come to know, as Plato describes it in Phaedrus, “the very Being itself with which true knowledge is concerned; the colorless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to mind.”

This website is devoted to the experience of that unitary, conscious source of all that is, with the hope that what you find here will inspire you on your journey to the permanent realization of the eternal Being that underlies and encompasses all.